


Sublime Alienation

by peachdoxie



Category: Venom (Comics)
Genre: It/Its Pronouns for the symbiote, Other, Takes place sometime after Costa but before whatever else happened, they/them pronouns for venom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:13:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22888246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peachdoxie/pseuds/peachdoxie
Summary: "[The abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having becomealter ego, drops so that 'I' does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence." - Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: Essays on AbjectionEddie and the symbiote go on a date and ponder what it means to be a monster.
Relationships: Symbrock - Relationship
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	Sublime Alienation

It’s close to midnight.

Eddie parks the pickup truck at the end of a strip of dirt barely able to be called a road. He cuts the engine, plunging him into darkness. No matter. His eyes adjust to the darkness much faster than those of a normal human.

He leaves the keys and his wallet with the fake ID under the front seat and cracks the window, no more than half a centimeter so that the symbiote can unlock the door when they return. Theft is unlikely out here, but Liz would be pissed if they somehow blew another false identity.

Eddie’s not very good at denying what they are.

Their destination is a few miles up a thin trail in the woods. It would take an average hiker several hours to get there. It will take them maybe fifteen minutes.

Eddie takes a moment to arch his back before asking, “Ready, dear?”

The symbiote responds by melting away the embellishments of clothing it imitated. It hugs tight to Eddie’s skin, crawling up his neck and down his arms like drops of water on a window. It doesn’t have to do this, could simply grow out from where it lingers just beneath the top layer of skin, but Eddie enjoys the feeling of changing—of transitioning—of _becoming—_ and so the symbiote indulges him. 

Before the final piece of their transformation falls into place, Eddie breathes his last breath. The symbiote spills down his throat, and for a moment, as always, Eddie feels like he’s drowning. He takes off running into the woods.

Symbiotic fangs break through his gum line, coloring his taste with a hint of blood. There are never the same number of teeth, just as the tongue—now burst out from his mouth—is never the same length. 

The tongue is a bit inconvenient while running at full speed through the woods, but they wouldn’t be Venom without it. The tongue and the teeth set them apart and remind people of what they truly are.

A monster.

Most people are wrong, of course, about what makes Venom a monster. It’s not the tongue and the teeth—their appearance is literally superficial—though it helps reinforce it. And it’s not the killing and maiming, hunting and preying, either. Plenty of people are capable of that without becoming monsters.

They run through the woods at full speed, leaping over rocks and dodging fallen tree branches. Their lungs burn, but this is hardly the worst they’ve been through. It’s nice, to not be running _from_ someone or something wishing to do them harm. Eddie is the only human around for miles, and besides: Venom is certainly the most dangerous predator in these woods right now.

As the gradient of the trail increases, Venom shifts to running not on two legs, but to loping along on all four. The symbiote adjusts Eddie’s joints and muscles to make the movement easier, their passage more swift.

No one really knows what to make of Venom, where they fall in the average person’s schema of categorization. Villain? Hero? Both? Neither? They defy the definitions forced upon them.

No, what makes Venom a monster is not their might and their reputation, but rather that they are _free._ They thrive in the space between meaning.

Their destination looms ahead of them and they quickly close the distance. A sheer cliff face, its summit more than half a mile in the air. 

Venom runs towards the base of the cliff. They do not slow their approach—Venom, instead, leaps off the ground with superhuman thighs from more than three meters away and slams into the rock face. The impact would concuss a normal human, but Venom does not pause. The symbiote, once again, alters Eddie’s body to make their ascent less difficult.

At least—Eddie thrives in the space between meaning. The symbiote, not so much.

Eddie’s union with the symbiote released him from the confines in which he dwelled, freed him from being bound by the social rules he was raised to follow. It is the greatest gift he has ever received. 

That’s not to say that the symbiote doesn’t find its union with Eddie as anything _other_ than a gift, either—what it had been longing for its entire existence. What it had been damned for.

There are two methods for tackling the climb up the cliff face. Venom chooses the harder one, but the one which necessitates cooperation. It would be easy for the symbiote to drag their body up the cliff like a snail hugs the wall of an aquarium. Instead, Venom digs their claws into the handholds and footholds, the rigidity of their human body supported and augmented by the symbiote to find gaps too small to use otherwise.

Unusually winded, Venom huffs as they climb. They don’t look down, not yet.

The symbiote understands what it is to be a monster. As soon as it learned the word from Eddie’s mind, it knew: it is a monster. Condemned by its own kind for desiring something different. Aberrant. Deviant. Out of line. It understands that it is a monster, that Eddie is a monster, that Venom is a monster, but whereas Eddie finds his joyous pleasure in the meaning of the word, the symbiote does not. 

Venom summits the cliff and hauls themselves to stand at its very edge. The sounds of the city are long behind them, the wind long still. Eddie’s heart pounds in their ear. _Alive,_ it says, _alive, alive, alive._

Together, Venom has seen many things beyond verbal description. This is but another, yet the magnitude of the vista still takes their breath away.

Eddie attunes to the symbiote’s train of thoughts, its lack of understanding.

Spread before them is a starlit valley, unencumbered by the light of the moon. Massive rock formations jut out of the ground. Where they fade into the night, the stars begin, so close and yet so far. Above, they catch a glimpse of what they came here to see: a meteor, streaking through the sky.

Venom’s breath hitches in their throat.

 _Look, my dear,_ Eddie thinks. 

The vertigo threatens to overwhelm them, to unmake and remake them in impossible comprehension. It tantalizes them, just beyond their reach.

_This is what it means to love you._

In the face of the universe spread bare before them, Venom feels small—and yet. It is something they both understand; that feeling of something almost wholly beyond their reach, yet threatening to drown them and bury them if they let it in.

The pot boils over— Venom can no longer contain it— the energy must go somewhere—

Venom turns their face to the sky and screams, a deep ululating roar that comes from neither human nor symbiote alone, but the marriage of their voices together.

Their form shakes; their human half at the last dregs of its breath, their symbiote half quivering.

At the end of their bellow, there is a moment, a stillness, and Venom embraces losing themselves in that boundless, formless object.

 _Oh,_ the symbiote replies. It understands.

It is a simple syllogism. Eddie loves to be a monster. Eddie loves to love the symbiote. To be a monster, therefore, is to love the symbiote—to accept what has been abjected and revel in existing in the breakdown between his self and his other. And to be embraced in return.

It is not something that many can understand.

Here, where the heavens touch the earth and the finite becomes infinite, they find again their apotheosis.

It is fitting that they are watching the Geminids.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written in part for @symbruary over on tumblr for the prompt "monster", but truth be told this scene has been floating around in my head for over a year. But currently, I'm also taking a class on "Monsters in Popular Culture", which I'll admit, I am taking because my interest in Venom dragged me into an interest in the phenomenology of monsters. I was particularly inspired by our reading by Julia Kristeva on the "abject", which I felt defines Venom's relationship pretty well. Abjection - as a process - occurs when an individual is confronted with the breakdown between "self" and "other" (in the Lacanian sense) and is formative in creating one's sense of self. Eddie Brock, in the better writings of Venom, seems to me to love existing in a state of abjection, constantly affronted by the breakdown between self and other. 
> 
> The title is taken from a quote by Kristeva from her book "Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection". It's pretty fitting to the feelings and concepts I was trying to capture in this fic. It's also quite punny - the symbiote is literally an alien.
> 
> I also threw a fair amount of Kant to this. I've been smitten with his concept of the sublime for several years now, and I think it also defines Venom's relationship fairly well. In the Kantian sense, the sublime is a feeling beyond the beautiful, that indescribable and overwhelming sense you get when looking at a mountain, for example, though tbqh I'm not *entirely* certain that's the sense Kristeva was using it in. Either way. Whatever. Philosophy's made up anyway. I stole a few quotes from the Bernard translation of Kant's "Critique of Judgment" where he talks about the sublime and scattered them in this fic.
> 
> By the way, whoever first used the term "other" for the symbiote is an absolute genius. It fits so well.
> 
> While abjection and the sublime aren't exactly the same, they're fairly similar, and I reckon Eddie feels a sense of the sublime in his abjected state of being with and loving the symbiote. I tried to capture it in writing here. I think it's part of what interests me so much about Venom as both a character and a concept. 
> 
> There's also the reference to the Geminids: the meteors originating in the segment of the sky that contains the constellation Gemini, the Twins. Castor and Pollux were born from the same mother, but from different fathers. In some versions of the myth, Pollux is immortal while Castor is not. When Castor is killed, Pollux shares his immortality with him. There's some symbolic/metaphorical/whatever stuff in the myth that can be applied to Venom and the bond between Eddie and the symbiote. I didn't play much into that, but that's what the last line is in reference to.
> 
> The first line is a reference to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" because, y'know, "There's no escaping the jaws of the alien this time (they're open wide)". Plus it's a good way to tell you what time of day it is without going into much exposition hehehe.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for reading!


End file.
